Scrubbing Peter Stuyvesant from American History

Move over Christopher Columbus, it’s Peter Stuyvesant’s turn to get scorched in the monuments war.

A Jewish activist group is now demanding Mayor de Blasio scrub all traces of the anti-Semitic Dutch governor from city property — even Stuyvesant High School — as part of his campaign to rid the city of “symbols or hate.”

“Peter Stuyvesant was an extreme racist who targeted Jews and other minorities including Catholics and energetically tried to prohibit them from settling in then New Amsterdam,” said Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, the head of the Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center.

“New York, of all American cities, which boasts such important Jewish history and claims such a present day vibrant Jewish community, should take the lead in denouncing Stuyvesant’s bigotry.”
Stuyvesant did eventually allow the people he described as “deceitful,” “very repugnant” and “blasphemous” to settle at the order of the Dutch West India Company.

Peter Stuyvesant [1610-1672]

Early Founder/Historic Leader

Peter Stuyvesant, also known as Petrus Stuyvesant, is an important figure in the history of New York City [earlier New Amsterdam], New York State and New Netherland. His name is still commonly used, especially in New York State, for street names, school names, building names, etc. A British-German-Danish cigarette brand is also named after him. Surprisingly, his ancestors no longer bear his name. His last direct descendant, Augustus Van Horne Stuyvesant Jr. died in 1953 at age 83 in New York City. A nineteenth century Stuyvesant descendant, Rutherford Stuyvesant, changed his name to Stuyvesant Rutherford in 1863 to satisfy the terms of a will. The paucity of descendants bearing his name may have something to do with the fact that Peter Stuyvesant has been blamed for turning over New Amsterdam to the British in 1664. The blame is not quite fair, because the citizens of New Amsterdam refused to help defend the city against a fleet of British warships. As a result Stuyvesant was forced to hand the city of New Amsterdam over to the British who promptly renamed it New York.

Peter, or Petrus, Stuyvesant was, according to some sources, born in Scherpenzeel, a town near the provincial border of Gelderland and Utrecht, and not far from the bustling city of Amsterdam in 1610. Other sources claim his birthplace is identified as Peperga in Friesland, and that claim may be correct because he apparently had attended the University of Franeker, located in Northern Friesland.

Prior to becoming Director-General, essentially Governor, of New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant had served as a Director of the ABC Islands in the West Indies. The ABC Islands consisted of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao. In both capacities he was in the employ of the Dutch West India [DWI] Company, a large and influential Dutch trading company. There was little Dutch government activity in the management of DWI because the Dutch, during the period 1568-1648, were actively fighting for their independence from the Spanish colonialists, and the government was not in a position to also manage its own colonies. It had in essence outsourced this activity to the DWI.

During his directorship of the ABC islands, Stuyvesant had lost his right leg in a skirmish with either the Portuguese or the Spanish. As a result he spent the rest of his life on a peg leg. His disability did not generate much mercy among his citizens who called him peg leg Stuyvesant.

Stuyvesant was rather authoritarian with his subjects and he is frequently depicted as despotic. He refused to share power with the citizens of the new colony of New Amsterdam. He also tried to control the Dutch Reformed Church and even banned some of its ministers from the colony. When alcohol consumption became a problem in the colony he tried to control it and regulate the sale of it. When other religious groups such as Jews, Lutherans and Quakers tried to establish houses of worship he banned them. In other words he made no attempts to endear himself to the citizenry and to gain their support. The stand off between Stuyvesant and the citizens became so severe that the directors of DWI in Amsterdam even became involved in it. They forced Stuyvesant to modify his strict rules and regulations.

So when the British Navy reached New Amsterdam in 1664, Stuyvesant’s call to man the ramparts fell on deaf ears. The city surrendered to the British, who then proceeded to not only take over New Amsterdam but all of New Netherland which included all of New York State and parts of New England and New Jersey.

It would be unfair not to look at the positive aspects of Stuyvesant’s eighteen year rule over the colony of New Amsterdam. During his rule the population expanded from 2,000 to 8,000, trade flourished and he was able to establish a sense of law and order in the community populated by people from many countries and many backgrounds. He also followed the directives of his bosses at DWI closely.

Following the surrender of New Amsterdam to the British, Stuyvesant, as a dutiful servant of the DWI, sailed back to the headquarters of DWI in Amsterdam. He did not receive a hearty welcome, but a dressing down for causing the loss of New Amsterdam to the British.

Stuyvesant returned to what was then called New York, formerly New Amsterdam, and settled down on his farm on the bowery. The area where his farm stood is still called the Bowery today. Stuyvesant passed away in 1672. His remains were buried in a vault at St. Mark’s Church in New York City. The slab covering the tomb states: “In this vault lies buried Petrus Stuyvesant late Captain General and Governor in Chief of Amsterdam in New Netherland now called New York and the Dutch West India Islands. Died 1671-1672. Aged 80 Years.”

Once you remove your history, the Communists can take over without firing a shot, because nobody remembers who the enemy is, as evidenced by the recent actions in South Carolina, where, despite opposition from several groups and community leaders, the Jewish Power Structure (NWO/JWO) was able to sneak through a new law redefining the meaning of the term “antisemitism”. As South Carolina goes, so goes the Nation.

In these dark days in which the power of secular fundamentalism appears to be on the rise and in which religious freedom seems to be imperiled, it is easy for Christians to become despondent. The clouds of radical relativism seem to obscure the light of objective truth and it can be difficult to discern any silver lining to help us illumine the future with hope.

In such gloomy times the example of the martyrs can be encouraging. Those who laid down their lives for Christ and His Church in worse times than ours are beacons of light, dispelling the darkness with their baptism of blood. “Upon such sacrifices,” King Lear tells his soon to be martyred daughter Cordelia, “The gods themselves throw incense.”

It is said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church and, if this is so, more bloody seed has been sown in the past century than in any of the bloody centuries that preceded it. Tens of millions have been slaughtered on the blood-soaked altars of national and international socialism in Europe, China, Cambodia and elsewhere. Today, in many parts of the world, millions upon millions are being slaughtered in the womb in the name of “reproductive rights.”

In such a meretricious age the giant figure of Alexander Solzhenitsyn emerges as a colossus of courage. Born in Russia in 1918, only months after the secular fundamentalists had swept to power in the Bolshevik Revolution, Solzhenitsyn was brainwashed by a state education system which taught him that socialism was just and that religion was the enemy of the people. Like most of his school friends, he enslaved himself to the zeitgeist, became an atheist and joined the communist party.

Serving in the Soviet army on the Eastern Front during the Second World War he witnessed cold blooded murder and the raping of women and children as the Red Army took its “revenge” on the Germans. Disillusioned, he committed the indiscretion of criticizing the Soviet leader Josef Stalin and was imprisoned for eight years as a political dissident.

While in prison, he resolved to expose the horrors of the Soviet system. Shortly after his release, during a period of compulsory exile in Kazakhstan, he was diagnosed with a malignant cancer in its advanced stages and was not expected to live. In the face of what appeared to be impending death, he converted to Christianity and was astonished by what he considered to be a miraculous recovery.

Throughout the 1960s Solzhenitsyn published three novels exposing the secularist tyranny of the Soviet Union and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. Following the publication in 1973 of his seminal work, The Gulag Archipelago, an exposé of the treatment of political dissidents in the Soviet prison system, he was arrested and expelled from the Soviet Union, thereafter living the life of an exile in Switzerland and the United States. He finally returned to Russia in 1994, after the collapse of the Soviet system.

In 1978, Solzhenitsyn caused great controversy when he criticized the secularism and hedonism of the West in his famous commencement address at Harvard University. Condemning the nations of the so-called free West for being morally bankrupt, he urged that it was time “to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.”

The emphasis on rights instead of responsibilities was leading to “the abyss of human decadence” and to the committing of “moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror.” At the root of the modern malaise was the modern philosophy of “rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy,” which declared the “autonomy of man from any higher authority above him.” Such a view “could also be called anthropocentrity, with man seen as the centre of all.”

It is ultimately of little matter whether the sickness that is slowly poisoning the West is given the labels that Solzhenitsyn affixed to it, or whether we prefer to give it the name of secular fundamentalism. The disease by any other name would be as deadly.

Furthermore, this disease is not merely destructive but self-destructive. It has no long-term future. Although secular fundamentalist “progressives” might believe in a future “golden age,” such an age does not exist. The future that they herald is merely one of gathering gloom and ever darkening clouds. This fate has ever been so for those who proclaim their “Pride.” They have nothing to expect in the future but their fall.

As for the Christian, he has nothing to fear but his falling into the pride of despair. If he avoids becoming despondent and retains his humility, he will receive the gift of hope which is its fruit. Where there is hope there is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

As we await the fall of the latest manifestation of secular fundamentalism, we need to remember that the culture of death is a parasite. It does not give life; it only destroys or corrupts it. Like all successful parasites it kills itself when it kills the host culture on which it feeds. It is not merely deadly but suicidal. It is unsustainable. It cannot survive.

Let’s not forget that Hitler’s promise of a Thousand Year Reich lasted only twelve years. In similar vein, the communist revolution which according to Marx would usher in the end of history, is itself a ruined remnant of history. Little could Solzhenitsyn have known when he languished as one of the many millions in the Soviet prison system that he would outlive the Soviet system and, furthermore, that his own courage would play an important part in that very system’s collapse.

Returning to the imagery of gloom-laden skies with which we began, we should remind ourselves that clouds and the shadows they cast are transient. Evil is nihilistic, which is another way of saying that it is ultimately nothing. It is only a temporary blocking of the light. “Above all shadows rides the Sun,” as the ever-humble Samwise Gamgee proclaims in The Lord of the Rings. Even in these dark days, as Solzhenitsyn reminds us, every cloud has a silver lining.

Books by Dr. Pearce, including his book on Solzhenitsyn, may be found in in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore.

That “silver lining” will be evidenced by Patriots who fight back and win. Don’t allow our veterans to die in vain. Don’t let our veterans fight alone. It’s time for every American to get off the couch, turn off the tel-lie-vision, and fight back.

Kevin Tully, American Hero and Iraq War veteran

Once you have woken up to the hidden hand behind all of the Cultural Marxism, hi-jacked Christianity, criminal banking, Common Core education, Star Chamber justice system, and BigPharma health care, you will find out who is running the Deep State. Follow the money! Your life, liberty and property are at stake.

The American gulags are built and ready to go. All it’s going to take is an economic collapse, the start of World War III, and the anger and frustration that has been brewing in the United States will reach a critical tipping point, and another civil war will break out.

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